A theft of paintings, a frustrated terrorist attack against a Jewish community, murders and attempted murders of several homeless people, an illegal arms sale, a grand theft… And a Former President of the United States indicted for the first time in history.
The building that houses the criminal courts of Manhattan, at 100 Center Street in the downtown area of the city, is preparing to become this Tuesday the epicenter of the political earthquake and legal unleashed in the United States after the indictment, on Thursday, of Donald Trump. If the contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination uses the tactics and strategies he has used to deal with problems with the law since he first began dealing with them in the 1970s as a real estate developer, the quake could drag on for months.
At the moment everything is ready for the first impact. Trump, who is at his private residence at his owned club at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach this weekend, is scheduled to fly Monday night from Florida to LaGuardia Airport, In New York. He will spend the night at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where police presence and protection have been intensified since Thursday.
RELATED
On Tuesday morning, his entourage, which includes secret service agents in charge of his security, is scheduled to arrive between 1:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. at the offices of the Manhattan district attorney led by the Democrat Alvin Bragg, where Trump will surrender. Before, at noon, the New York Republican Youth Club has called a “peaceful & rdquor; in his favor in the square in front of the judicial facilities, in which the presence of the radical congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene is announced.
trump will be processed and filed before being taken to court to be formally charged. According to NBC sources, this indictment will take place at approximately 2:15 p.m. and will take place on the fifteenth floor of the building, which will be emptied, and in the same room where Harvey Weinstein was tried and convicted in 2020.
The session will be chaired by state Supreme Court judge Juan Merchan, a magistrate born in Colombia whom Trump has attacked (“He hates me”, he wrote on social networks) and who already presided over the recent trial that ended with a conviction for tax fraud for two entities of the Trump Organization, in addition to a guilty plea from the financial adviser, Allen Weisselberg, And it will be at that moment that Trump and his lawyers will know the charges against the former president.
At least one felony charge
Although since the grand jury vote on Thursday and until then they remain sealed, according to anonymous sources cited by the US media they contain more than 30 charges of business fraud. Those charges would be linked to the falsification of documents to hide as alleged fees for withholding Michael Cohen’s legal services the reimbursement in several checks of the $130,000 that Trump’s lawyer paid in October 2016, shortly before the 2016 presidential elections. , to Stephanie Clifford, known by her stage name in the porn industry, Stormy Daniels, to keep quiet about the sexual relationship she alleges she had with Trump in 2006.
The payment to Daniels itself is not illegal, but document forgery is a misdemeanor in New York, and can be elevated to a felony if it can be shown that it was made to commit or conceal a crime. And according to the Associated Press agency, at least one of the charges in the statement against Trump is for a felony, which according to the New York penal code can be punished with a sentence of between one and four years in prison. What is not known is what crime it would be, although the main theory is that Bragg has linked the forgery with violation of campaign finance laws.
Trump’s lawyers have already announced that he will plead not guilty. He will almost certainly be released on his own word, because New York law does not allow for bail when there are no violent crimes. And he is scheduled to return the same Tuesday night to Florida.
More than a year on average
What will start from that moment will be a lengthy judicial process. If criminal proceedings in New York usually take more than a year on average from the first phases of investigation to the start of the trial, in the case of Trump they come across someone accustomed to using delaying tactics. And in this case, they could favor him politically, since they would help to keep his prosecution as a central issue as the internal struggle in the Republican Party is waged to position itself for the 2024 primaries. In addition, it continues to serve him to fill his chests. In the 24 hours after his indictment alone, his campaign reported in an email, Trump raised more than $4 million. More than 25% came from new donors, according to the campaign, and the average contribution was $34.
Trump’s lawyers have announced that they will immediately file motions and the former could seek to have the case dismissed outright. Another lawyer for the former president, who represents him in the federal investigation studying his handling of classified documents, has said that they should be expected “in a matter of days or weeks, not months & rdquor ;.
Many more enter the deck of cards with which to delay the process. The former president’s lawyers have also suggested that they will try to have the action of the grand jury reviewed. They could also try to seek a change of scenery by citing the alleged difficulty in finding an impartial jury in New York, a dominantly Democratic city. They would also have options to try to lower the charges, have the judge recuse himself or disqualify the prosecutor.
